NYSE plan to update private data feed draws criticism from IEX

NEW YORK (Reuters) - Upstart stock trading venue IEX Group on Thursday criticized a plan by the New York Stock Exchange to give a more complete view of transactions executed on the exchange only to firms that pay a premium for that service.

"It's a fundamental issue about fairness and transparency," said John Ramsay, chief market policy officer at IEX, and former head of the U.S. Security and Exchange Commission's Division of Trading and Markets.

All 11 U.S. stock exchanges are required to report the orders that they execute to a public data feed that consolidates the information so that everyone knows the best prices most recently available and the sequences and sizes of the trades. The information is used by investors to figure out which exchanges they have the best chance of getting their orders filled at.

Most exchanges send information about every individual trade that they complete to the public data feed.

NYSE, which is owned by Intercontinental Exchange, reports the information differently, bunching some transactions together and reporting them as single executions if at least one side of the trade was made up of a single order. So, if an order to buy 1,000 shares is executed against five orders selling 200 shares, NYSE reports that as a single trade of 1,000 shares.

NYSE now plans to begin reporting all individual trades, but only to its proprietary data feed, which firms have to pay extra to get, according to a filing made by NYSE to the SEC.

The exchange would continue sending bunched trade confirmations to the public feed.

"The whole point of having a last price consolidated data stream is a single way of understanding last sale and best bid that everybody can rely on," Ramsay said. "People can't just pick whatever method they think benefits them and call that reliable."

NYSE plans to add the individual trades to its private data feed so it is more in line with the data feeds of competing exchanges, a spokeswoman for the exchange told Reuters.

She said NYSE is considering providing the individual trade information to the public feed in the future as part of the exchange's roll out of a new technology platform for its stock and options markets that will be completed by 2017.

"It is standard practice for proprietary data feeds to provide more granular order level information than consolidated feed," NYSE said.

(Reporting by John McCrank; additional reporting by Herbert Lash; Editing by Bernard Orr)